New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

October 30, 2009

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Whose App Ecosystem Will Win?

The recent buzz about the Verizon/Motorola/Google (An)Droid vs. Apple/AT&T/et al iPhone has revolved around two customer-critical issues and one supplier-critical one (can you guess which is which?):

• Which device+network combo meets customers' usability requirements?• Which brand evokes the most loyalty?• Which ecosystem will attract the most apps?

As pundits review and early adopters swarm, I've been noticing a few patterns in the dialog. It's not about the device. Sure, everyone comments about display resolution, keyboard quality (or lack thereof), industrial design, and user interface. But there are also provocative wars of words (and maps) about network availability (in the U.S.—other countries have more pervasive mobile networks than ours). These are the initial barriers to adoption. Do I like it? Can I use it?

But, in the end, the customer's deep emotional connection is with the brand. Am I an Apple sort of person or a Google sort of person? Or both? Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Apple clearly trumps Google when it comes to customers' brand passion and self-image.

To me, the most interesting discussion has been the one about which platform will attract the best and coolest apps. The conventional wisdom goes that whichever platform succeeds as the biggest app-magnet will draw the largest customer base in a virtuous circle.

I beg to differ. I believe that both the iPhone/iTouch platform and the Android platform are spawning amazing innovations in mobile application development and inventive mash ups. Apple has a head start, but Google's APIs always attract huge amounts of brainpower and inventiveness from all over the world. A year from now, we'll see very healthy and dynamic ecosystems of smart, mobile apps on both platforms.

What does this mean for your company? Whether you're an established brand, a start-up, or an aggregator who wants to attract customers to rely on your brand's mobile apps, you're probably already developing apps for (at least) both platforms. The good news is that there are a number of cross-platform development environments as well as cross-platform usage tracking and ad-serving networks available. The bad news is that you'll need to ramp up your mobile development resources if you don't want to be left in the dust. Not having state-of-the art mobile apps is now akin to not having a Web site in the late 1990s. It's embarrassing. Bad for the brand and bad for business if you want your customers to "have it their way."

Mobile apps are rich, interactive tools that enable customers to interact with your company and your services anywhere and anytime, without having to search and browse. Customers who value the information or services you provide will download and use them. Cool apps may win Word-of-Mouth buzz, and bring you new customers. But their main purpose is to foster loyalty and brand passion with your existing customers. So you'll probably justify your investment through customer retention, mindshare and walletshare, rather than customer acquisition. But, as you present your mobile apps business case, don't forget to consider your customers' metrics. How much time are you saving them? How many steps are you saving them? How much added convenience are you providing? What leg up are they getting vis a vis their competitors or in crowd?

Comments

There is no doubt in my mind that the apps on iphone are far superior to the apps on Android. The problem with Android's apps are they are limited and don't seem as user friendly, I know Google wants to improve or capitalize on Android's apps database, but I think it will never compete with Apple. Just look at the amount of apps listed on iphone index sites like www.dozeniphone.com and you will see what I mean. The iPhone has an app for everything, Android has an app for some things. That's the difference.